[OT] Migrating from non-free programs to LibreOffice

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 3:45 AM, Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
> I tend to add my own [styles]
> for quotes, captions, etc.  After composing the document,
> then you modify the styles to set the spacings, fonts, indentations,
> border lines, etc.  The workflow is very similar to using LyX, or even a
> plain markup language for that matter.

That's all very well when you put everything into a single file, but
how do you manage those styles across a multi-file book? Mum's project
was partially rescued by the discovery that you can import styles from
another document, but that's still unworkable for repeated edits.

> The weakest part of LibreOffice is embedding images.

And that's why this particular book is being divided up: it's full of
images. Putting the whole thing into a single file makes that file way
way too big to work with (at least on the computer Mum's using - it's
X times larger than her installed RAM, so Writer is constantly
hammering the page file), and there's no convenient way to read in
only part of the file. Hence my recommendation of a markup system like
LaTeX that simply *references* images, and which deliberately isn't
WYSIWYG; plus, having the concept of content, structure, and style all
separate means it's not difficult to build just one file - maybe not
even a whole chapter - while still being confident that all pages
reference the same styles.

ChrisA